Blog.

Google Doodles Fight Back Against Spam

Today’s Google Doodle sees a competition winner rewarded with their logo being shown on the home page – it goes by the name of “Planet Earth” and is a tribute to David Attenbrough, lovely stuff:

Interestingly, when you click on the doodle, it takes you to a page that tells you about the competition that was ran, along with runners up efforts etc. This may be a one off as normally, clicking on the doodle will take you to the search results related to the contents of the image – however, these SERPs have been under attack from scammers keen to exploit the number of searches performed on a particular topic on the day a doodle is released, as well as targeting other popular search trends.

According to this report, a recent doodle in tribute to L.L.Zamenhoff** saw 27 of the top 50 sites returned to be vicious malware sites. Whilst Google actively remove these sites from the SERPs, it would seem they think it safer to link through to a page of their own rather than risk taking their users to sites containing malware.

**I’d say if you don’t know who he is, perform a search, but then again, maybe it’s best not knowing.